Satisfied customers are the key to maintaining and growing a successful business. However, for many transaction-based businesses, and especially for financial institutions such as banks, it is often necessary to charge fees to customers for certain behaviors. For example, if a customer account holder at a bank overdraws his account by writing a bad check, the institution must choose either to cover the account holder for the overdrawn amount, or to return the check to the corresponding bank of the check recipient. In either case, the bank will incur an additional expense, and the economic realities of the business often dictate imposing fees to discourage account holders from such behaviors. These fees are typically called non-sufficient funds or overdrawn (NSF/OD) fees, and are just one of many types of fees that businesses may charge their customers.
On the other hand, all businesses value customer loyalty and longevity, and must do their best to keep and maintain the customers that provide a steady and reliable source of income for the business. Thus, banks and other financial institutions must occasionally bend or break the rules for imposing fees against account holders in the name of customer relations. Typically, these decisions are left to the discretion of the customer service employees of the bank. For example, a bank manager may refer to customer account records or may recall from personal experience that a particular customer is highly valued or more deserving of a fee exemption for an NSF/OD occurrence. When such a customer requests a fee refund for the NSF/OD occurrence, the bank manager is more likely to oblige. Thus, the fee refund policy a business as a whole may be dictated by the combined knowledge and discretion of its front-line customer service personnel.
However, not surprisingly, leaving fee refund decisions up to individual employees often creates inconsistency in the overall refund policy of a business. For example, even though bank managers and customer service personnel may be trained to allow refunds in certain circumstances and deny them in others, this conventional solution has several shortcomings. First, training employees to properly understand and execute the bank's refund policy may impose a substantial cost on the bank. Second, front-line bank employees might not always have immediate access to all of the relevant information for the account and customer requesting the refund, making it difficult for the employee to make the appropriate refund decision. For example, it may be desirable to allow a fee refund based not only on the customer's banking history, but also on the banking history of the customer's immediate family, which a bank employee might not have the time or resources to discover. Bank employees using their own discretion may also be more sympathetic and likely to offer more refunds and higher refunds than is dictated by the bank's policy. Additionally, relying on employee discretion for offering fee refunds to customers often results in so-called “refund shopping.” A customer that is denied a fee refund at one bank branch may simply drive over to a different bank branch in the hope of finding a more sympathetic employee. The lack of uniformity and consistency in offering fee refunds can waste the resources of the bank and undermine the bank's overall fee refund policy.
Accordingly, there remains a need for systems and methods for offering fee refunds to customers at financial institutions and other businesses.